


And Indeed There Will Be Time

by SqutternutBosh



Series: Torchwood Season 3: What could have been [7]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 03, F/M, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:06:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28903851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SqutternutBosh/pseuds/SqutternutBosh
Summary: Episode 7 of my alternate season 3.When an angered young blowfish with a broken vortex manipulator transports Jack, Ianto and Owen back in time, it's up to Gwen and Tosh to get them back.Stuck in the 1970s, Jack turns to the one person he can trust for help - even if she does hate him - leading Ianto to learn one more of the secrets Jack has been keeping.
Relationships: Gwen Cooper/Rhys Williams, Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Series: Torchwood Season 3: What could have been [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1735756
Comments: 56
Kudos: 66





	1. Chapter 1

_And indeed there will be time  
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,  
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;  
There will be time, there will be time  
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;  
There will be time to murder and create,  
And time for all the works and days of hands  
That lift and drop a question on your plate;  
Time for you and time for me,  
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,  
And for a hundred visions and revisions,  
Before the taking of a toast and tea._

**_\- T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’_ **

Jack flings the SUV right out of Womanby Street, pulling hard on the steering wheel and sending them hurtling down Castle Street. It’s broad daylight and they’re in pursuit of a blowfish on a quad bike, speeding past Cardiff Castle. Welsh dragons flutter on the flagpoles. Just another day.

‘Tosh, scramble all the camera feeds within a two mile radius of the castle, we can’t have this getting out,’ he says over his comms unit, shouting over the engine noise. For Tosh, back in the Hub, he must sound unnecessarily loud.

‘Doing what I can,’ Tosh replies.

‘Watch out for that bus!’ Ianto yells from the passenger seat. Jack reacts fast, throwing the SUV out hard, dodging both the bus and an oncoming taxi. The sudden movement throws Ianto into him and sends Owen sprawling across the back seat.

‘Since when has there been a bus lane there?’ he asks, focusing in again on the blowfish.

They’ve come up against this one before, he’s an adolescent, out looking for some fun. They still haven’t assessed where he managed to get hold of a quad bike, but blowfish love joyriding and it doesn’t take them long to figure out how to get anything with wheels up to top speed.

Cars are screeching out of their way now. Jack has put the lights and siren on to make the chase seem like official police business and to give people warning to get out of their way, but there’s no doubt the blowfish is catching people’s attention. If he had a moment to take his eyes of his target, Jack would see slack-jawed faces all around him – one elderly man is so shocked he drops his shopping bags.

The blowfish follows the bend in the road around the castle walls and then takes a hard right, crossing a lane of oncoming traffic to disappear down a lane between two tall buildings just before the Hilton. Jack grits his teeth and drops down two gears as he’s forced to do the same, swerving an oblivious student who has no idea what’s going on around him thanks to a massive pair of headphones.

As mad as he is that the blowfish is forcing him to do this in front of so many witnesses, so many who are now in danger because of the recklessness of this one alien, Jack can’t help but love the chase. He hits the accelerator pedal hard as they mount the pavement and launch down the lane.

‘We’ve scrambled the video feeds,’ Gwen’s voice comes through on the comms now. The time has come for her to start taking a step back from active duties, so she’s back in the Hub with Tosh teaching her how to offer remote support. She’ll never be as quick as Tosh using the systems, but Jack is confident she’ll pick up everything they need and still be able to bring a lot to the team.

‘Already seeding a story about a student prank and some high-quality fancy dress,’ Tosh adds.

Jack brings the SUV to a screeching halt, sirens still blaring, lights flashing off the dark-bricked walls alongside them. They’ve reached a sharp turn in the alleyway, one that the young blowfish had clearly smashed into at force. The bright red quad bike he’d been driving is now upside-down, wheels still spinning, thick plumes of smoke spilling out from its cracked exterior.

The blowfish, bleeding from several gashes, is extricating himself from under the wreck. He looks up at them, bearing down on him in the armoured SUV, then throws his arms down onto the ground and uses them to drive himself upwards, sprinting away. It’s not a quick sprint though, he’s limping, hampered by an injury he’s picked up in the crash.

‘Pursuing on foot,’ Jack says to the pair in the Hub as Ianto and Owen bail out of the car. ‘We’ll check in with you once we’ve caught our fishy friend.’

As they head down the darkened lane at a steady jog, eyes and ears alert for their prey, Ianto’s mobile rings. Panting slightly, he pulls it out from his pocket and checks the name on the screen before answering.

‘Rhi, this isn’t a good time,’ he says. ‘Yeah, work stuff… Nothing to worry about!... Look, I’ll call you back later, okay? This won’t take long.’

He hangs up and drops the phone back into his inside pocket.

‘Sorry,’ he adds, spotting Jack’s raised eyebrow. ‘I promised Rhiannon I’d stop dodging her calls.’

Jack nods.

The path they’re following is taking them round the back of the Hilton. Steam billows out from the laundry room vents, blowing hot on Jack’s face. It smells sweet and floral. The height of the buildings standing above the narrow lane blocks out the sun, making it feel much later in the day then it actually is. It’s not even lunchtime yet but it feels like the Friday night clubbers will be pouring out onto the streets at any moment.

‘There he is,’ says Owen, pointing to an overflowing skip. ‘Hiding, just behind there.’

The three of them pick up their pace, coming to surround the blowfish on all sides, their guns trained on his finned head. The blowfish makes no move to run away this time. He uses the skip to haul himself to his feet and stares them all down, fins bristling.

He’s dressed in ripped jeans and a zip-up hoodie, the hood of which he’d have no chance at pulling up over his head. Finished off with a pair of beat-up, navy Converse, he’d blend in well with the local high school population if it wasn’t for the deep red, common to the families of blowfish found in the Cardiff area.

‘This doesn’t have to be difficult,’ Jack says. ‘You can come quietly.’

The blowfish spits at his feet, his quills quivering.

‘Why would I do that?’ he says. ‘You lot killed my brother.’

Jack can recall the incident well.

‘He gave us no choice,’ Jack tells him. ‘You, you still have one. We’re giving you that choice now.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s what the guns are for, are they? Giving me a choice?’

‘You just put dozens of lives in danger with that little stunt you pulled on the quad bike,’ Owen reminds him, grip on his gun unwavering.

The blowfish grins, flashing them his pointed teeth.

‘I had to get your attention,’ he tells them. ‘Make enough of a scene and Torchwood will come running.’

Jack’s getting impatient now. He’s tempted to just tackle the young blowfish, give him a bit of a scare back at the Hub, and send him on his way with a warning.

‘Fine, you’ve got our attention,’ he says. ‘What do you want?’

The blowfish grabs the sleeve of his dark hoodie and starts to pull it up. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack sees Ianto retrain his aim.

The blowfish twists his arm to present them the thing he’d been hiding up his sleeve.

‘Where did you get that?’ Jack demands.

For there, cuffed to the blowfish’s skinny arm and at least two sizes too big, is the leather wristband of a vortex manipulator. Numbers twist into symbols that Jack hasn’t seen in a long time on the open panel.

‘Doesn’t matter where I got it,’ the blowfish says. ‘What matters is what I’m gonna do with it.’

Still holding the arm with the vortex manipulator up for them to see, the blowfish brings his other hand around to the buttons.

‘Jack, what-?’ Owen starts, as Jack dives forwards towards the blowfish.

‘STOP!’ he shouts as he lunges out for it, but it’s too late, the button has been pressed.

A familiar sensation washes over Jack – it’s like pins and needles and a sudden, desperate dehydration, and that’s all it takes for him to know he’s travelling through time.

*~*TW*~*

Back at the Hub, Tosh pushes against her desk, rolling her chair away from it. She takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. She’s been meaning to go to the opticians for a while now, she thinks her prescription needs adjusting, but she hasn’t found the time. Instead, she strains her eyes and takes an Ibuprofen if the pulsing feeling just behind her forehead won’t go away.

‘Anything more we can do right now, Tosh?’ Gwen asks from over at her workstation.

Tosh shakes her head and stretches her arms out in front of her, interlacing her fingers and arching her back. She’d had to do health and safety videos about ergonomics once, in a desk job that feels like another lifetime ago, and they’d all talked about the importance of getting up and stretching every once in a while. They definitely recommended doing this more so than Tosh ever remembers to do.

‘We’ll be here if they call in for anything else,’ Tosh says, ‘but it’s one blowfish on foot, so I expect it’ll be radio silence until they show up back here.’

‘Okay,’ says Gwen. She leans back in her own chair, hand coming down to rest on her baby bump.

Myfanwy caws from up in the rafters. Tosh rolls back over to her computer and runs a few checks. She can’t find any camera feeds down the lane the SUV had disappeared down. Gwen had already diverted any police presence from the area, telling them the problem was under control, so when Tosh flicks through the camera feeds from back out on the main street. It’s as if everything has gone back to normal. Cardiff is remarkably good at that.

Tosh is startled out of her people-watching by a squeal from Gwen.

‘Oh, come and look, Tosh!’ she says, beckoning Tosh over to her computer, a wide smile on her face.

Tosh gets to her feet and goes over to Gwen.

On Gwen’s screen is a photo of a brightly smiling young couple, a bearded man resting his head on top of a red-headed woman’s. The woman has her left hand held up to the camera, displaying a sparkling diamond on her ring finger.

‘Is that-?’ Tosh starts.

‘Emma,’ Gwen says. ‘Emma who came through the Rift from the 1950s. She only learnt how to do emails a few months ago and now look!’

Tosh’s lips form a smile but she doesn’t feel it. It’s not that she doesn’t feel happy for Emma, it’s amazing how resilient the once naïve, young woman has been, but somewhere inside, she feels a sadness for herself.

She can’t remember the last time someone held her the way the man in the photo is holding Emma, his arm wound around her, pulling her close to him.

‘She’s done well, hasn’t she?’ Tosh says after a moment.

‘She has,’ Gwen agrees, still staring at the photo. ‘Oh, I’m so pleased for her. That’s Ben,’ she says, tapping the image of the man on screen. ‘He taught the computer classes Emma went to. She says he’s very sweet and he looks out for her, knowing she hasn’t got anyone else.’

‘Maybe we’ll get invited to the wedding,’ Tosh says, aiming to instil some brightness into her voice.

It clearly hadn’t worked as, after she returns to her seat, she feels Gwen’s eyes on her.

‘Are you alright, Tosh?’ she asks.

Tosh examines the newest photo on her desk. It’s of her and her mother, on the first day she’d been able to go and see her again. They had talked for hours in her mother’s new house, a bungalow she’d been set up in in Winchester, away from her old home for her own safety. There’d been so much Tosh had wanted to tell her and so much she couldn’t. Eventually, they’d gone for a walk to a local coffee shop and a stranger had snapped this photo of them sat in the window seat of the coffee place, an expanse of stained, wooden table between them.

‘My mother thinks I must be lonely,’ she says.

‘And are you?’ Gwen asks.

‘Not most of the time. I’ve got my work, and the team, and…’ she forces her eyes not to stray over towards the Med Bay. She sighs. ‘I’ve never been very good at relationships.’

Gwen kindly doesn’t comment on the relationships she’s witnessed Tosh in during their time working together.

‘But you’d like to meet someone?’ she asks.

This time Tosh can’t help but look down towards the Med Bay. Has she got anything with Owen? Could their friendship and quiet understanding of one another grow into something more?

Sometimes, when their eyes meet over a tough case, or they share a joke, Tosh thinks it could, but then… They never had gone on that date they’d arranged once, before Owen died. It had never come up again.

‘I probably should try and put myself out there more,’ she admits.

‘How do you feel about blind dates?’

‘Oh, Gwen, I don’t know.’

‘No, look, I won’t set anything up if you don’t want to go, I know they can be so awkward, only, Rhys has this cousin that’s just moved to Cardiff and she -,’

‘She?’ Tosh cuts in.

‘Yeah, sorry, I thought you -,’

‘No, no, it’s fine. It’s just, you said Rhys and I’d started to picture someone more like him.’

Gwen laughs.

‘No, Catrin gets her looks from the other side of the family. And her brains too. She’s come down here from Rhyl to do an engineering PhD.’

Gwen looks at her expectantly. Tosh considers her options. Between continuing to pine over Owen and going on a date with an actual person, the choice seems clear even if the whole set-up scenario is awkward.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Set us up.’

Gwen beams.

‘Great, I’ll give her a call later.’

Tosh smiles her thanks to Gwen. Her heart races a little – it’s been a while since she took control of her love life. And Rhys’s cousin – surely she can’t be an alien? Rhys is as salt-of-the-earth as they come.

She looks back at her screen. Then frowns and checks a few parameters. There doesn’t seem to be any problem with the trackers in the comms units, they’re feeding back to her software as being live and yet…

‘Shit,’ she says.

‘What is it?’ Gwen asks, rolling over to Tosh on her chair.

‘I can’t get a read on Jack, Owen or Ianto. Their comms units are live but it’s like they’ve vanished off the face of the earth.’

Gwen meets her eyes, her own wide.

‘Shit,’ she says.

*~*TW*~*

Jack isn’t so out of practice with vortex manipulator travel that he falls over when his feet reform on solid ground, but Ianto and Owen aren’t so fortunate. Both hit the deck hard, without even enough warning to put their hands out to slow their falls.

Jack helps them both up, asking if they’re alright. Both make affirmative noises, brushing themselves down and trying to look unbothered, but Jack knows they’re both rattled; Ianto doesn’t complain about the scuffed knees of his trousers and Owen doesn’t even mention the new grazes he’s picked up that are never going to heal.

‘Where the hell did he get one of your special wrist straps?’ Owen asks, nodding his head at Jack’s wrist.

‘It’s called a vortex manipulator,’ Jack says as he taps into his. He clears his throat, still dry from the time travel. ‘And he shouldn’t have been able to use it like he did, never mind where he got it from.’

‘Where are we then?’ Ianto asks.

Jack glances up, waiting for his vortex manipulator to pick up new co-ordinates. He may not be able to use it to travel with but he can usually rely on it for spatio-temporal co-ordinates, it just tends to run a bit slow.

They’re still in a dark alleyway, much the same as they had been. The buildings looming over them appear to be the ones they’d been surrounded by in their confrontation with the blowfish, and Jack can faintly hear the noise of traffic not far away. There’s no sign of the blowfish.

‘We’re still in the same place, geographically,’ Jack says.

Owen whips his head from examining the bloodless new cuts on his palms.

‘And time-ically?’ he demands.

‘Chronologically,’ Ianto corrects, his default setting to mess with Owen not deterred by their trip.

Jack’s vortex manipulator has settled on a date. Taking the numbers in, Jack releases a long breath.

‘Jack? What is it?’ Ianto asks, stepping closer to him. He looks down at the little screen on the vortex manipulator but can’t make sense of the reading, only Time Agents can. ‘Where – when are we?’

Jack meets Ianto’s eyes, seeing the fear in them that he’s failing to mask. Owen is watching him expectantly.

‘October 19th, 1976,’ Jack says.

‘Shit,’ says Owen. ‘SHIT!’

He shouts, kicking out at a nearby wall. Jack grabs his shoulder, pulling him away before he can hurt himself.

‘Owen,’ he says, gripping the smaller man’s forearms, shaking him. ‘We’re going to be alright, I’m going to get us all home.’

‘Yeah? And how’re you going to do that? We all know that vortex manipulator of yours is broken or you’d have fucked off out of here years ago.’

Owen’s dark eyes challenge Jack.

‘Maybe once I would have done that, but not anymore,’ Jack says steadily, straightening up and relinquishing his grip on Owen. Owen backs off, shaking his shoulders out. ‘We’re all going back to 2008 together.’

He looks over at Ianto, who has remained silent since Jack had revealed the year they were in. Jack sees him draw in a deep breath, as if he’d been trying to decide something in his head and has now made his choice.

‘1976,’ he finally says, covering a slight tremor in his voice. ‘Only forty years out. Could’ve been worse, at least there are still flushing toilets here.’

‘And disco, and mutton chops, and flares,’ adds Jack, with an appreciative smile to Ianto. At least one of them still believes in him.

‘We’ll blend right in,’ Owen says sarcastically. ‘Go on then, how’re we getting home? I don’t fancy taking the long way round.’

‘We’re still in Cardiff, so we still have Torchwood here,’ Jack says. ‘We can’t go directly to them because we need to do everything we can to reduce our impact on the timelines, plus there’s a chance we’ll run into me. That’s a big time travel no-no.’

‘Sounds like Torchwood are no good to us then,’ says Owen.

Jack hesitates. As soon as he’d seen the date on his vortex manipulator, one face had come straight to his mind. A face that certainly won’t be happy to see him but nevertheless is one he feels he can trust.

‘That’s not strictly true,’ he says. ‘I know someone who’s connected to Torchwood, who can help us figure out what to do.’

‘Who’s that then?’ Ianto asks.

Jack knows Ianto would know the name from the records, would know her skills and the cases she’d been involved with. He won’t have seen the deeper cover records, however, the identities that hide something Jack hasn’t discussed with any of his team, not even Ianto. If he could avoid getting them involved, he would, but he can’t see any other way.

‘You’ll see,’ he says, wanting to guard his secret for just a little while longer. He doesn’t know what might change when this comes out. He and Ianto are in a good place, a not-complicated place and this… This could get complicated.

He starts to walk down the alley towards a bight flash of sun that dazzles him.

‘Come on,’ he calls back to the other two. If he had looked around as he did so, he’d have seen Owen and Ianto sharing a look, silently questioning the other about Jack and what was going on. ‘We’ve got some walking to do.’

*~*TW*~*

With no personal trackers to go on, Tosh tracks down the SUV instead. They find it just near the Hilton, parked up not far away from where they had last heard from Jack. Gwen eases her car up behind it and the pair get out, racing over to the familiar black vehicle. The blue lights are flashing along the windscreen, but there’s no one inside.

Gwen tugs one of the door handles – locked.

‘Jack?’ she calls, voice echoing down the alleyway. ‘Owen? Ianto?’

Tosh has already rounded the corner ahead of her. She shouts over to Gwen,

‘Come and look at this!’

Gwen jogs to catch up, following the alleyway round until she can exactly what Tosh has called her over for.

‘The quad bike the blowfish was riding,’ Tosh says. She’s crouched down beside it, checking through the upside-down wreck. She stands back up and gestures towards the scrapes on the brick wall. ‘Looks like he hit the wall pretty hard.’

‘And no sign of him either,’ says Gwen, looking around her. ‘No sign of any of them.’

She spots a CCTV camera mounted on the wall ahead of them, overlooking a skip, recording the back door of the Hilton.

‘Do you think that camera got a good view of what happened?’ she asks Tosh, nodding her head towards it. Tosh looks up at it, then walks up to it, stopping beneath it. She sweeps her head around as if she were the camera examining the goings-on in this alleyway that smells strongly of chips, with a hint of chlorine from the hotel pool. The combination reminds Gwen of swimming lessons at the leisure centre as a kid, her dad always treating her to a hot, salty bowl of chips when she’d got a new swimming badge.

‘It’s better than nothing,’ Tosh concludes, stepping away from the wall and her position as human camera. ‘It’s closed circuit though, we need the hotel to give us the footage.’

Gwen rummages in her pocket for her Torchwood badge. It glints in the light as she removes it and flops the case open for Tosh.

‘Not a problem,’ she says. ‘Get set up in the SUV, I’ll be back in a minute.’

The receptionist in the hotel asks more questions of Gwen and her ID than the older gentleman, Gerry, on the security desk. Shut up in a cramped room at the end of a long corridor, Gwen thinks he’s excited to have some human company for a change. She has to exchange pleasantries with him for longer than she’d like considering she’s on the case of three missing friends who could very much be in need of her help.

After fifteen minutes, she manages to get away with the footage they need. Gerry hadn’t seen anything odd, but had admitted he didn’t tend to keep an eye on that feed during the day as nothing ever happened there, no one even used that back entrance anymore.

Tosh is ready and waiting for her in the SUV, laptop open. Gwen sees she’s got an ongoing search running for Jack, Ianto and Owen’s trackers but it keeps pinging a negative result back to her.

‘Everything alright?’ Tosh asks as Gwen hands her the freshly burnt DVD.

‘Chatty security guard,’ Gwen explains, getting in next to Tosh and closing the door.

‘Did he see anything?’

Gwen shakes her head.

‘Doesn’t keep an eye on that feed in the day, apparently.’

‘Might be for the best.’

Tosh slides the DVD into her disc drive and opens up the video player. Black and white footage blinks to life on the screen. Tosh hits fast-forward. So little happens for the first minute that Gwen would think they were just looking at a photo if it weren’t for the flickering timestamps advancing through the minutes in the bottom corner.

‘We last spoke to Jack just after 11,’ Tosh says, clicking to slow the fast forward down. ‘So we should see something soon.’

Mere seconds after Tosh says this, they witness the quad bike slamming into the wall. The blowfish is hurled over the top of it. He writhes in pain for a few seconds, then hauls himself up, clutching his leg. He starts to run with a limp, not getting far before Jack bursts onto the screen. The camera shows him in profile, Owen just behind and what must be Ianto a grainy silhouette further back.

Jack’s mouth moves on screen, but there’s no sound on the video. He’s got his gun out, a warning for the blowfish who shouts back at them now. Gwen’s eyes bounce between the two of them as they speak but she can’t make out any words. The footage is too low quality and she’s never been any good at lip reading.

The blowfish brandishes something on his arm. Whatever it is seems to stun Jack, who pauses for a moment, then lowers his gun. The blowfish speaks some more, then brings his arm round to press the thing on his wrist.

Jack lunges forward but, in a flash, the three Torchwood agents are gone. The blowfish stares at the space where they had been, then falls back against the wall laughing. After another minute, he uses the wall to drag himself up, and walks out of shot.

‘I think I know why we can’t track them,’ Tosh says grimly. Gwen looks from the screen to meet Tosh’s eyes. ‘Could you tell what that thing on the blowfish’s wrist was?’

‘Not quite,’ Gwen replies.

‘A vortex manipulator,’ Tosh says. ‘Just like Jack’s. He never takes that thing off, I’ve never got a good look at it, but he’s told me one or two things about it and its primary purpose is-,’

‘Time travel,’ Gwen finishes for her. ‘Fucking hell.’

‘They could be anywhere,’ says Tosh. ‘Any _when_.’

Gwen’s mind is racing. She has to keep her mind busy, keep thinking through solutions and ignoring the painful thud of her heart which could all too easily give in to despair.

‘We have to find that blowfish,’ she says after a moment. ‘He’ll know where he sent them, right? And if we can get the vortex manipulator off him, we can use it to get them back.’

Tosh is back at her laptop, fingers flying over the keys.

‘We’re right in the town centre, cameras all over the place. We should easily be able to track him,’ she says.

Gwen releases a shaky breath.

‘Okay, good,’ she says. ‘And when we do find him, oh boy, am I going to have words with him.’

Tosh looks up from the computer for a moment, her lips fixed into a grim smile.

‘Not if I beat you to it,’ she says.

*~*TW*~*

Ianto can’t help but feel surprised when, after walking for just over an hour, Jack stops outside an ordinary suburban house.

Walking through the 1970s had been a very strange experience. Ianto knows, logically, that everything in the past was just as clear and colourful as the world is for him in the twenty-first century, but shaky old video footage had always fixed a certain idea of the time period in his head, and one of those ideas was that the whole word was a bit more pixelated back then.

But everything is so _real_. The past is full of life and colour and noise and smells. They had come out of the alleyway and come face-to-face with the castle wall, something Ianto has known all his life. If it wasn’t for the procession of very dated looking cars swinging by, Ianto might not even had known he’d gone back in time. He’d even spotted a white Ford Cortina, just like the rust-bucket his dad had managed to keep running well into the late eighties when it finally gave up on a trip to Ianto’s grandmother’s in Hengoed.

Jack had kept quiet as they walked, reminding both he and Owen to keep close and not get too involved or draw attention to themselves. Ianto was sure he and Owen were drawing some interested looks for their modern clothing – not to mention their short hairstyles, very against the trend – but the walking anachronism that is Jack told them it wasn’t a big deal. They blended in well enough.

Ianto’s glad they hadn’t had to go out of their way to find outfits to fit in more. He shudders to think that the double-breasted brown suits he’s seeing everywhere were once all the rage. And the sheer amount of corduroy on display…

A lot about Cardiff is still very similar. Jack had led them past the castle and on to Cathedral Road, heading up towards Llandaff, all the older parts of the city so Ianto doesn’t feel like too much is missing.

As they walk, Owen sullen beside him, Ianto wonders about where Jack is taking them and who they’re going to see. For all his space-faring anecdotes and war stories, Jack is pretty quiet about Torchwood teams of old. Ianto knows this is for a good reason – for a long time, Jack had just been a contractor, and hadn’t agreed with Torchwood’s approach on a lot of things. There are more people in the past that Jack hasn’t got on with than those he has.

It’s an unusually warm day for October, one of those brilliantly bright autumnal days that lights the falling leaves up gold and bathes the world in a soft glow. Ianto has finally relented and removed his suit jacket when Jack comes to a stop outside a very normal semi-detached house. They’re in the heart of Llandaff, not far from the Taff.

Jack rests his hand on the peeling garden gate.

‘Here we are then,’ he says, pushing the gate open with a creak.

A cobbled path leads the way up to the front door. The garden lawn is on the long side, and the flowerbeds along the front wall are overgrown, rhododendrons and spiky rose bushes tumbling out onto the grass.

As Jack shuts the gate, there’s a noise from up at the house. The front door opens.

Ianto just has time to take in the face of a woman – olive-skinned, probably mid-thirties, positively glaring at Jack – when he gets distracted by something milling about by her feet.

A toddler.

Ianto looks back at Jack, a question etched in his face. Jack gives him a soft smile, then dials it up into his ‘I’m the captain’ grin and turns it on the woman on the doorway.

The toddler comes stumbling down the garden path, making a beeline for Jack on chubby, unsteady legs. She’s a whirl of dark blonde curls and dungarees that passes Ianto, reaching out for Jack, saying,

‘Da-da, Da-da!’


	2. Chapter 2

Jack grabs the bounding girl and whisks her up on to his hip as if it hasn’t been three decades since he last did so. She giggles and snuggles into him and his heart leaps.

He gazes down into her baby face, taking in the plumpness of her cheeks, the wild curls, the long, dark eyelashes. She’ll grow out of all of this one day. The look she’s giving him, her innocent eyes so full of trust and love, she’ll grow out of that too. It’s been a few months since he’d last seen Alice, adult Alice back in 2008, and he was lucky to get even a glimmer of the affection this young girl is giving him now.

He holds her close to him and breathes in deep for a moment, soaking it in. His chest constricts. He presses a kiss to the top of her head and cups her face, his hand bigger than her head.

‘Hi there, baby girl,’ he says softly. ‘Did you miss me?’

Her not-yet-co-ordinated fingers grab for the lapel of his coat.

‘Where Dada been?’ she asks.

He grins and tickles her tummy.

‘Where haven’t I been?’ he says. She laughs and tries to bat his hand away.

‘You’re not supposed to come here without letting me know first,’ Lucia’s voice shatters Jack’s illusion that it’s just he and his daughter alone in the world. When he’d seen Alice come running towards him, he’d forgotten about everything and everyone else.

He looks up from Alice to see Lucia, staring him down from the front step. She hasn’t come closer, as if she’s guarding the door. Ianto and Owen are stood at the garden wall. Seeing them here, in the house his now grown daughter had grown up in, feels wrong. They look much more out of time here than they ever did back in the city centre.

‘Can we come in?’ Jack asks, coming closer to Lucia, Alice still on his hip.

‘I don’t like having you here at the best of times, Jack, why would I let you and two strangers into my house?’ she says, holding firm, arms folded.

Jack gets close enough to hand Alice back to her mother. Alice protests, reaching out for Jack, but Lucia grasps her hand gently and strokes it, pulling it back towards her.

‘I’m not who you think I am, Lucia,’ he tells her, voice low.

‘You’ve tried that line before.’

Jack grits his teeth. Years of old arguments are flashing before his eyes. He and Lucia had never _liked_ each other, but they had worked well together, they were efficient, they got the job done. And the rage they could bubble up inside one another led to some fantastic sex.

‘I wouldn’t be here if I had any other option. Look at my friends back there, does anything seem odd about them?’ he asks.

Lucia looks past Jack to Ianto and Owen, who have clearly understood that they need to stand back and wait for everything here to be resolved. He hasn’t had time yet to consider what they’re making of all of this, of the puzzle pieces they’re probably slotting together in their minds right now.

‘You know I don’t care to comment on the company you keep, Jack,’ she says after a few seconds. ‘And I’ll thank you not to bring anything strange or dangerous to the place where _our child_ lives.’

Jack goes to brush Alice’s curls but Lucia swerves her back out of his reach. Jack’s hand falls to his side.

‘An hour ago, we were in 2008,’ he tells her. ‘I still work for Torchwood. Ianto and Owen back there, they’re part of the team too. We’ve been sent back here by an alien we were pursuing and I need your help so we can send a message to the rest of our team in the future, telling them when we are so they can use the Rift to come and bring us back. I’ve promised Ianto and Owen I’ll get them home. They don’t belong here, they haven’t even been born yet.’

As he speaks, Lucia’s almond eyes study his face. Jack keeps his expression open and honest, watching her mind at work as she takes in everything he’s just said.

Her nostrils flare.

‘Prove it,’ she says.

Jack is taken aback.

‘What?’

‘I’ve worked for Torchwood for a long time, Jack, I’ve seen the tricks other species can play on us. I can’t just take you at your word, not when it’s been so unreliable.’

Jack thinks for a moment.

‘Ianto,’ he calls, turning around to his teammates. ‘Have you got your wallet on you?’

He already knows the answer. Fastidious by nature, Jack knows Ianto always checks he has his keys, wallet, phone, weevil spray and retcon ready when he heads out for any job.

‘Uh, yes?’ Ianto says. He takes a few uncertain steps forward. ‘Why?’

‘Can you show Lucia here your driving licence please?’

Ianto walks the rest of the way up the garden path, pulling his wallet out of his pocket as he does so. He flips through his cards, lighting upon the piece of pink plastic he’s looking for, then hands it to Jack.

Jack holds it out for Lucia.

‘Look at the date of birth,’ he tells her.

Lucia frowns as she reads it.

‘1983.’

‘And the date of issue?’

‘2001. It’s not a lot to go on, anyone can make a fake.’

‘But this fake looks nothing like the paper licence you have, right? Makes it less realistic, if I wanted you to believe a fake licence, I’d have made it look more familiar, right? I could go another route to convince you I’m me, tell people about a particular mole you have on -,’

‘Jack!’

He pauses. Takes a breath.

‘Please trust me, Lucia. You know I wouldn’t bring anything like this anywhere near Alice if I could help it.’

She sighs.

‘Fine, come in, explain yourselves. But I’m warning you now, I’ve got weapons hidden in every room so if you even put a foot out of line, I’ll-,’

‘Got it. We’ll be very well-behaved house guests, I promise.’

Lucia pushes the door open and enters the house, leaving it for the others to follow.

Jack looks down at the shiny plastic in his hand before handing Ianto his driving license.

‘I forgot your middle name was Morgan,’ he says.

Ianto takes it and tucks it back into his wallet, not reacting to Jack’s comment.

‘What’s going on, Jack?’ he says after he’s put his wallet carefully back in his pocket. ‘Who is she? And the kid, she-,’

‘I’ll explain soon, I promise,’ Jack cuts over his concerns, brushing a hand along Ianto’s arm. ‘Let me just finish getting Lucia on board to help us and then I’ll tell you everything.’

The furrow of Ianto’s eyebrows expresses his uncertainty. He glances through the front door, taking in the Victorian tiling and the loud, orange wallpaper. Lucia has already disappeared through another door, the one Jack knows leads into the living room.

Jack shouts over to Owen, who also opens his mouth to begin what Jack is sure must be a tirade of questions, but Jack stops him.

‘Answers soon. Let’s get this whole accidental time travel mess sorted first, that’s the priority here.’

*~*TW*~*

Tosh has enough kit on board the SUV to start tracking the blowfish down without she and Gwen having to go back to the Hub. It makes sense to stay in town too, Tosh reasons, as it’s likely their suspect hasn’t gone far.

Her system flags all of the cameras available in the nearby area, some of which she’d scrambled not long before to hide the alien car-chase happening through the city centre.

She maps the list of cameras onto the local streets, scanning through and picking out potential paths the blowfish could have taken. His first few movements are easy enough to trace – he exits the alleyway, passes the hotel and continues down Greyfriars Road, passing all the bars and crossing the road towards the New Theatre.

It’s when he crosses the busy intersection of Boulevard De Nantes, then zig-zags before reaching the National Museum that she starts to struggle. He’s entered a residential area, with fewer cameras and she starts to run into dead ends with every new feed she brings up.

She rolls her neck around and feels the familiar crunch that comes from having been hunched over a laptop too long. With a sigh, she clicks into another camera feed, getting further and further away from where she’d last seen him.

Gwen appears bearing coffee and a cheese and ham toastie from the coffee shop around the corner. Tosh accepts it and takes a grateful sip. Sometimes she mourns the fact that Ianto has turned them all into such coffee snobs – she would never have been able to tell the beans in her drink right now were over-roasted if he hadn’t taught her how to notice these things.

The cheese and ham toastie, however, is sublime, as all things with hot, melted cheese tend to be. Steam spirals out of the golden toast as she takes another bite.

‘Any luck?’ Gwen asks, sitting back with her own lunch.

‘I had him until he got into Cathays. Student houses don’t tend to have cameras on them,’ she answers, flicking through into another camera feed. Gwen leans in to study it with her, looking out for the limping figure they’d been following, black hood pulled up over his fins.

No luck. She pulls up the view from a traffic camera and searches for the relevant time code.

‘There, is that him?’ Gwen asks, pointing at a monochrome figure on the screen. The quality isn’t good but Tosh thinks she might be on to something. She switches to the traffic camera view from the opposite side of the junction.

The light falls better here, confirming they’ve found the right guy. He’s pulling keys out of his pocket and opening the front door of a corner terrace.

‘Gotcha,’ says Tosh, taking a satisfied screenshot.

Gwen is already scrambling into the driver’s seat, adjusting it from the position Jack had had it in for his much longer legs. As she rushes to fix the mirrors too, Tosh remembers a conversation they’d had long ago, Gwen suggesting a rota for the SUV and taking turns driving, remembers how Owen and Jack had very much vetoed the idea.

She wants to hear their voices again, to know they’re alright, to listen to one of those silly arguments again. The silence of their comms screams out to her. They could be anywhere. What if they’d been sent 2000 years back in the past like Gray had done? What if they’d gone even further? Or to the future?

As Gwen eases the car out of the alleyway, leaving her own behind, Tosh remembers something else too. Her own journey back in time, back to the 1940s. She had had Jack with her and he had promised to look after her. Even as the bombs fell around them, she had never doubted that.

She takes comfort in that. Wherever they are, Jack is with them, and Jack always looks out for his team.

*~*TW*~*

Ianto doesn’t need answers from Jack to understand what’s going on around him. He’s got enough evidence before him to build up a pretty clear picture.

Jack had a child – children? – in the 1970s. If she’s still alive today, in 2008, she’d be older than Ianto.

He’s struggling to take that in. He knows, _he knows_ , that Jack is much older than he looks. He’s seen the files, he’s heard the stories, but that’s what they’ve always seemed like – stories. Being back here, seeing this with his own eyes, makes it all suddenly a hell of a lot more real.

Even when Jack dies and resurrects, it’s easy to forget that not ageing is part of the deal. In the few years Ianto has known Jack, he’s seen their leader change and grow as a person. They all have. Jack’s version of it is just very different to what goes on for the rest of them.

Owen, stood beside him, scowling around at the orange, floral wallpaper, being a recent exception to this rule, of course.

‘I think my Grandad had this wallpaper,’ he says to Ianto. ‘I always hated it.’

Jack leads them into the front room. Dark green sofas sit up against the walls, tassels tangled along their bottom edges. A boxy, wooden TV flickers in the corner beside an electric fire.

Lucia sets the child down and she wanders over to a set of wooden animals spread across the floor. Ianto hadn’t caught the toddler’s name as Jack had swept her up into his arms but it had only taken a second for him to notice the love Jack had in his eyes for the young girl.

And it seems like as much as Jack loves his child, the child’s mother dislikes him more.

Lucia perches on the edge of one of the seats, eyes flitting between the three of them, as if already regretting her decision. Jack gestures for Owen and Ianto to take the other sofa, which they do, then he stands in front of the fireplace. He can’t stop watching the little girl and Ianto struggles to stop watching him.

‘Go on then, out with it,’ Lucia says. Ianto has detected a faint hint of something neither of Welsh or English origin in her accent, something bouncy and Mediterranean.

‘Ianto, Owen, this is Lucia Moretti,’ Jack starts. The full name immediately rings bells in Ianto’s minds, from hours spent down in the archives. ‘She’s with Torchwood Three, like us, via a UNIT outpost in Naples. Superb linguist and absolute crack-shot.’

‘Flattery isn’t the answer here, Jack,’ she says, a slight curl to her lips.

‘Lucia and I worked together in the sixties and seventies. I bounced around a bit back then, in and out of Torchwood,’ Jack continues. ‘Lucia semi-retired when she had Alice here. But, if I remember right, you still have access to the Hub?’

Lucia narrows her eyes.

‘I do, though I’m rarely there. I can continue a lot of my work from here, with my books, so I can look after Alice.’

‘But say, if we needed you to go there and hide a message, secure and timecoded in the archives, you could do that for us?’

‘I could.’

‘Will you?’

Lucia looks from Jack to Alice. She watches as the toddler raises a wooden giraffe up towards Jack to inspect.

‘Raff, Dada,’ she babbles.

He crouches down and takes it from her, pretending to make it run across her body. She screeches with delight.

Jack turns away from her for a second to smile at Ianto. Ianto’s stomach flips.

Alice gets up. She takes the giraffe back from Jack and now offers it up to her mother instead. Lucia takes it and runs a hand across its head.

‘If it’ll get you out of my hair,’ she says. ‘I can’t go until tomorrow though, my mother will have Alice then.’

‘We can watch her,’ Jack suggests. His tone his casual but Ianto can tell from the way he avoids Lucia’s eyes that this is something he desperately wants. To look her in the eye would be to expose this vulnerability.

‘Jack, I -,’ she starts.

‘Has anything bad ever happened to her on my watch?’

‘No, but-,’

‘I know you don’t trust me, you never have, but I trust you. All three of us, we’re trusting you so we can get back home,’ Jack says as he gets back to his feet, one hand passing through Alice’s curls. ‘And if that’s not enough for you, well, Owen’s a doctor. She couldn’t be in better hands.’

Lucia sighs. She reaches out for Alice, running a finger over her chin.

‘Write it down and I’ll take it,’ she says. ‘I’ll pretend I need to go and collect some more translations from the archive.’

*~*TW*~*

Gwen hammers the front door of the house they’d seen the blowfish enter, the flat of her hand slapping against the wood. It rattles in its frame.

‘Hello!’ she shouts. ‘Either let us in or we’ll find our own way in, it’s up to you.’

She has limited patience for any games here and she knows Tosh does too. She can see the other woman already fishing an alien lockpick, a recent Rift gift, out of her handbag.

Gwen doesn’t relent in banging the door as Tosh fires the device up.

‘Piss off!’ comes a voice from inside, a voice with the familiar trill through the words that all of the blowfish Gwen has come across have had.

‘You must have been expecting us, surely?’ Gwen asks as she moves aside to let Tosh near the door. She sets the device against the lock. ‘You can’t have thought you’d just make half our team disappear and we’d let you get away with it?’

‘I said, piss off!’

The lockpick beeps, victorious. Gwen pulls her gun out as Tosh twists the door handle and pulls the door open.

The blowfish inside is the very image of a deer in the headlights, framed in the narrow corridor, sunlight falling through onto him. He’s still in his ripped jeans, smudges of blood across the frayed fabric and his glistening cheeks.

‘Where did you send them?’ Tosh asks, calmly putting the lockpick away.

‘Send who?’

Gwen laughs, feels it harsh in her throat, then crosses the threshold. The blowfish is too slow to back away, and Gwen grabs a fistful of his shirt. They’re eye to eye now.

‘You know exactly who we’re talking about,’ she says. She taps the vortex manipulator on his wrist with the snout of her gun. ‘You used this, we know you did. You sent them somewhere through time and now we need you to tell us where.’

The blowfish’s ear fins twitch. He tries to shrug Gwen off but her grip is firm.

‘Tell us,’ she repeats.

‘Let go of me!’

‘I’d do as she says,’ Tosh says from behind Gwen. Gwen hears the click of her taking her gun off safety.

‘Get off! Look, get off me so I can look at this thing, alright?’ He raises his wrist to indicate the vortex manipulator. ‘I need to look at it to see where they went.’

Gwen releases him with a shove and stands back. The blowfish stumbles, but turns and uses the momentum to sprint off down the hallway, disappearing through another door.

‘Oi!’ Gwen calls after him, already giving chase. He slams the door hard into her, knocking the air out of her lungs, sending her crashing back into Tosh.

With little grace, they disentangle themselves and get back to their feet, running through the door. They find themselves in a kitchen that reeks of fish, piled high with dirty plates covered in fine bones. Gwen gags, her eyes fixed on the blowfish as he escapes through the back door and into the courtyard garden.

‘Go around, Tosh,’ she says, ‘I’ll chase him towards the traffic lights on the corner, be ready to take him out.’

Without a word, Tosh sprints back out of the house. Gwen runs hard herself, legs tight from the sudden blast of movement. She can feel her muscles working hard to drive her forward, working more than they’re used to to carry the extra weight of the baby.

The blowfish hurdles the low garden wall, landing in the garden of the neighbour in the next street over. Gwen hurries after him, throwing herself over the wall with less gusto than she would’ve done if she didn’t have a whole _other person_ on board.

He looks over his shoulder at her and zips over the next wall, this one higher, rolling over the top of it and falling down onto the street. Gwen has no choice this time but to go through the garden gate inset in the wall, luckily finding it unlocked.

She passes through it and looks left and right, trying to track him down.

There he is – running right into Tosh’s path.

Tosh steps out of her hiding place and zaps him with a stun gun, pressing it hard into his side. He collapses instantly.

Gwen jogs up to them, one hand on her pregnant belly, silently apologising to the baby for sloshing it about. She’s sure Owen would tell her that that’s not a thing, but it makes her feel better.

They’ve drawn the eyes of some onlookers now. As Gwen and Tosh sling his arms over their shoulders and pull him up, dragging him out to the SUV, Gwen tries some on-the-spot cover-up.

‘Ignore him, too much to drink,’ she says, directing her comments to the curious eyes around them. ‘Sorry!’

*~*TW*~*

Once Lucia leaves, Jack’s message in hand, Ianto busies himself in the kitchen. There aren’t any of the usual fancy gadgets he’d use here, it’s back to basics with a whistling kettle on the hob, but the ritual is calming all the same.

As he searches through the cupboards for coffee of any kind, Jack walks in, a sleepy Alice resting on his chest.

‘Owen’s watching Paddington,’ he says, taking a seat at the table. ‘It was his favourite as a kid, apparently.’

‘Much more acceptable than Tintin then,’ Ianto comments, crouching down to the next cupboard. Then he finds it, a jar of Nescafe Gold Blend, exactly as he remembered it being when he was young. He unscrews the jar and takes a sniff. Yep, there it was, the scent that had always flooded the house on a Saturday morning. Coffee had been a treat for occasional enjoyment back then.

He sets the jar on the counter and turns to face Jack.

‘She looks like you,’ he says softly.

Jack looks up from Alice’s sleeping face.

‘Do you think so?’ he asks. ‘I always thought she had a lot more of Lucia about her.’

‘No, there’s definitely something very Jack Harkness about that smile.’

Jack smiles now, the mirror of the look Ianto had seen on Alice’s face when she’d run down to Jack in the garden earlier.

Ianto turns back away from him and busies himself with the mugs.

‘Are there others?’ he says lightly, measuring out scoops of instant. The grains tumble down, tinkling against the ceramic.

‘Other what?’ Jack asks.

Ianto sets the spoon down, back still turned to the other man. He grips the edges of the counter. He’d told himself he could keep calm and rational about all of this.

‘You know what I mean, Jack.’

‘Ianto, I -,’ Jack starts, but Ianto interrupts him.

‘I’m not _mad_ , Jack, I don’t have any right to be mad. You know, logically, I know how old you are, how long you’ve been around, it doesn’t surprise me that you have a child. Or children. I just thought…’

He sighs. The kettle whistles and he picks it up off the hob.

‘Thought what?’ Jack asks.

Ianto pours water into the mugs. He stirs it, watching with disappoint as the coffee granules fail to become one with the water, rising to the surface in clumps instead.

He sets one of the mugs down in front of Jack and takes the seat opposite him.

‘I tell you everything, Jack,’ he says. ‘You’re the only one I tell everything.’

Jack picks his coffee up and blows on it. He frowns at the floating lumps of coffee grain on the surface.

‘I bet you don’t tell me _everything_ ,’ he says.

Ianto rolls his eyes.

‘Of course not _everything_ , everything. But important things, Jack, I tell you. And then, whenever I think we’re in a good place, we’ve got a good understanding of one another… There’s always something more.’

‘You know it’s hard for me.’

Ianto reaches over and takes the hand that Jack has wrapped around his mug.

‘I know, Jack. Believe me, I get it. It’s just, you’ve told me the story of you having sex in zero gravity with an acrobat at least three times and yet you’ve never mentioned you have kids.’

‘Kid,’ says Jack. He runs his other hand up and down Alice’s back. ‘Just this one.’

‘Did you… love Lucia?’

Jack snorts.

‘Did you get the impression she loved me? No, it wasn’t like that, it was just an occasional thing, and then, one day…’

‘It’s sort of surprising you don’t have more.’

‘Hey!’

Ianto sips his drink and holds Jack’s gaze steadily.

‘I got used to not telling people, for Alice’s own safety,’ Jack says after a moment. ‘I don’t see her very often anymore, or her son.’

Ianto’s mouth goes dry. The grip he thought he had on this conversation starts to spiral. A child sure, that was fine, plenty of people his own age had kids, but what Jack is suggesting was a step even further.

‘She has a son?’ he asks, tongue thick.

‘Yes. Steven. Similar age to your nephew.’

‘So, that makes you a-,’

‘Grandad, yes. He thinks I’m his uncle though. You see now why it’d be hard for me to tell you this? Ianto, you’re young, I forget how young sometimes, our lives are very, very different.’

‘You do know how to make the rest of very aware of our own mortality.’

‘Ianto -,’

‘You know what?’ Ianto says, pushing his chair back. It creaks across the floor. He feels light-headed as he gets to his feet. ‘I need some air, I’m going out in the garden.’

‘Ianto, wait-,’

‘No, Jack, no. Like I said, I’m not angry with you. I just… Give me some time to process this, okay? I travelled through time today, and I didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw my Great Auntie Bev coming out of Bute Park and she _died_ when I was six, first funeral I ever went to, so, with that and, and this… It’s just a lot. I just need to finish my coffee and have some fresh air.’

Feeling jittery all over, face hot, hands clammy, Ianto grabs his drink and heads out into the garden.

*~*TW*~*

The blowfish comes round again a few minutes after they get him into the back of the SUV. Tosh has the vortex manipulator off him and is studying it closely.

‘Give that back!’ he demands when he’s barely conscious. He struggles against the handcuffs Gwen has clipped his wrists into. Gwen, driving them back to the Hub, glances at him in the rear view mirror.

‘Where did you get this?’ Tosh asks him. ‘I don’t know a lot about them but I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t have one.’

‘Someone gave it to me, alright? I was doing her a favour so she gave it to me.’

‘Who was she?’ Tosh asks.

‘Don’t know, don’t care. Just give it back, it’s mine.’

Tosh slides the leather strap through her hand. It’s very similar to Jack’s, from what she’s seen of it, though slimmer.

‘Maybe, _maybe_ , if you tell us where you sent our friends we’ll consider giving it back to you,’ Gwen tells him.

‘I need it!’ he insists, wriggling about.

‘Tell us where you sent them!’ Gwen tells him, volume increasing. Tosh sees her eyes flash with impatience.

The blowfish bursts into tears. They’re huge globules of water, his gills working overtime to suck in air through his sobs.

‘I don’t know, okay? It’s broken! I was going to use it to get my brother back and now it’s broken!’


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to say in the previous chapter - I've stuck with Alice as Alice's name here rather than get into the whole Melissa/ Alice as a cover name thing! I just thought it was less confusing. However, as I didn't explain that, it might have been more confusing...

Lucia is taking longer on her trip to the Hub than Jack had thought she would. Dusk is starting to fall outside, a trail of pink bleeding into a dark purple sky. Not that he’s bemoaning the fact he’s getting plenty of time with Alice, but he does worry that someone may have seen through her ruse.

He’s fairly confident she won’t have run into his 1976 self. He had done a lot of international assignments in Alice’s first two years on earth, rarely seeing his little girl. Sometimes he thinks this is why Lucia took Alice into deeper cover by the end of the decade, taking her further away from him.

He had told himself he wasn’t running away from this commitment, from what had happened between he and Lucia but… He bounces a ball along the carpet to Alice, who wobbles after it. He chuckles at her ungainliness.

Okay, yes, he had run away. He had chosen the work that had taken him away. He had wanted to do everything he could to make loving Alice harder, to try not to love her at all so it wouldn’t hurt when he inevitably outlived her, his only child.

It hadn’t worked. Of course it hadn’t.

Alice tries to throw the ball back but lacks both the co-ordination and strength. She propels it about a foot forward and it rolls under the sofa.

She turns to him with wide, disappointed eyes. He retrieves the ball for her and hands it back. She takes it out of his hand with both of her tiny ones. She squeezes the rubber ball and as Jack watches, it’s like he can feel those little hands squeezing right on his heart.

He loves her more than anything.

Alice toddles away from Jack and holds the ball out to Owen, sat back into the sofa.

He looks at her.

‘What are you, a dog?’ he asks her. ‘You want me to throw this for you?’

‘Owen,’ Jack admonishes.

‘What?’ he says, taking the ball. ‘I don’t get kids at this age, I prefer it when they can talk. Then you know what they want.’

He bounces the ball off the carpet and Alice follows after it.

‘She can talk just fine. She’s very advanced for her age.’

Owen narrows his eyes and looks at Jack. He flops back into the sofa and looks for the remote again. The joy of finding old favourites had faded fast.

‘This is not the sort of dad I would have pictured you being,’ he says after a moment.

‘What kind of dad did you think I would be?’

‘Absent, mostly.’

Jack’s sure Owen doesn’t know how much his words sting. After all, they’re entirely accurate.

Alice returns to Jack with the ball once again and he scoops her up, tickling her tummy. She laughs, high-pitched and delighted, wriggling in no real attempt to escape.

Jack stops, giving her a chance to catch her breath. Her excited chest heaves up and down.

The door opens and Ianto steps in, face pink from the cooling air. He’s been outside for over an hour.

‘That was some fresh air,’ Jack comments lightly.

‘It was… helpful,’ Ianto says.

He shuts the door behind him. He crosses the room and then sits down, joining Jack on the floor in the bay window.

‘I’m, uh, not very good with children,’ he says after a moment.

His tie has caught Alice’s attention. She reaches out and grabs the end of it, tugging hard enough that she jerks Ianto’s head forward.

Jack takes her hand between two of his fingers and pulls her away.

‘Play nice,’ he says. ‘This is Ianto, can you say Ianto?’

She frowns and purses her lips, staring Ianto down. He smiles, clearly nervous.

‘Yaya,’ she pronounces after a moment.

Owen sniggers.

‘That’s it, that’s what you’re called from now on,’ he crows.

Ianto picks Alice’s abandoned ball up from the carpet and hurls it at Owen. It bounces off his skull and this time it’s Alice who’s laughing, and Jack too.

‘Again!’ she demands. ‘Again, again!’

‘You heard the young lady, Owen,’ says Ianto, placid as a lake. ‘Again.’

‘Sod that,’ says Owen, throwing the ball hard at Ianto. Ianto reacts faster than Owen had done and deflects it.

Alice scrambles out of Jack’s lap to go and retrieve it.

Jack looks away from her for a moment to face Ianto.

‘You ok?’ he says quietly, very aware of Owen sitting mere metres away.

‘Getting there,’ Ianto replies. ‘Sorry for freaking out.’

Jack shrugs.

‘I’ve had worse reactions.’

Alice returns, this time handing the ball to Ianto.

‘Yaya,’ she says with a stern pout. ‘Again.’

‘Of course,’ Ianto tells her, taking the ball and sending it hurtling towards Owen.

*~*TW*~*

Weeping blowfish in the cells, Tosh and Gwen turn to their new problem.

‘What do you think, Tosh?’ Gwen asks, perched on the edge of Tosh’s workstation. She nods her head in the direction of the vortex manipulator laid out on the desk. ‘Can you fix it?’

Tosh has removed the front panel of the strap. Underneath is a series of wires and soldering, as well as what looks like some memory storage and a few other pieces she’s not quite sure of yet. For something with such power, it looks surprisingly simple, so few parts.

She’s quietly confident. She had successfully created a time lock after all, so how difficult can a little bit of time travel be?

‘I just need to figure out which bit of it is broken,’ she tells Gwen, probing some of the wires with her finger. ‘Once I know that, I reckon I can fix it. It looks like it’s got some memory storage, so maybe there’s a trip computer in it that can tell us where it’s been.’

‘Anything I can do to help?’

Tosh blows some of her hair out of her eyes, focused on the device in front of her.

‘There’s a Tulian magnifier down in the archives that’s great for this kind of fiddly work. Could you go and get it for me please?’

‘Got it.’

*~*TW*~*

The ‘throw the ball at Owen’ game is endlessly hilarious to Alice. She laughs and claps with glee as Owen dangles other toys in front of her, trying to distract her with something new and shiny. She ignores them all, shouting ‘again, again’ each time the ball pings off Owen.

The sound of the front door opening and closing, however, proves enough to finally pull her attention away.

‘Mama!’ she greets as Lucia walks in, pulling her arms through her coat. Night has well and truly fallen outside now, taking the warmth of the sun with it.

Lucia picks her up, murmuring in Italian as she presses her nose to Alice’s.

Jack gets to his feet.

‘Did you do it?’ he asks her.

‘It’s done. It should already be going off in your time,’ she says.

‘So, Tosh and Gwen should be here any minute now?’ Owen asks.

Jack shakes his head.

‘I gave them tomorrow’s date in the message. If I gave them today’s they could have turned up too early in the morning and caused all kinds of problems.’

Lucia raises her eyebrows.

‘I suppose you want to stay here then?’ she asks.

‘We can go,’ Jack says, ‘but we’d need to be back here first thing, I told them to come to your address.’

Lucia sighs and rubs her forehead.

‘One night,’ she says, holding up one finger. ‘And then your plan better work, Jack.’

She turns her attention now to Alice.

‘Has your father fed you?’

Jack winces as Alice shakes her head. It hadn’t occurred to him.

‘No? Why am I not surprised?’

‘Sorry,’ he says, the word hollow on his tongue. Lucia is already heading out to the kitchen, Alice on her hip.

‘And I suppose you all need food too?’ she calls back towards the living room. ‘It’s going to have to be cacio e pepe, I’ve got nothing in.’

Ianto gets to his feet and starts to head towards the door. Jack knows he’s going to go and offer his help, can tell he wants to try and do something about the awkward air left by their presence and Lucia’s disdain, but Jack grabs the end of his sleeve and stops him.

‘She doesn’t like people in her kitchen,’ he says.

Ianto pales.

‘I already used her kettle,’ he says.

‘I know,’ Jack says with a grin. ‘She’s gonna hate that.’

*~*TW*~*

Gwen wanders through the archives, trailing her hand along the dusty shelves. Tosh had told her which section to find the magnifier she needed in, now Gwen only needed to remember where that section was.

She stops at a junction in the shelves, with three directions to choose from. They need labels in here, like in the library, she thinks. Some friendly lettering saying ‘25th century blasters this way’ and ‘Alien medical devices, next left’. She’ll suggest it to Ianto.

She’s about to start playing eenie-meenie-minie-mo to figure out where to go next when she hears something. A persistent beeping has started up, drifting down through the shelves.

She jumps back and presses herself against the nearest stack, immediately associating the sound with that of an explosive. When she’s calmed her breathing and heart rate and still nothing has happened, she follows the sound, looking for its source. The echoing nature of the archives doesn’t make this easy, as the beeps seem to bounce between the stacks, sometimes coming from one direction and then another.

After a minute, she finds herself at a set of metal lockers, the kind they used to have in the police station changing rooms with one immediately noticeable difference – instead of a keyhole, Gwen sees small digital screens inset with numbers lit up in the red of retro alarm clocks. Gwen can’t make sense of what any of the numbers mean.

One of the doors has swung open, in the bottom corner. The beeping is coming from within it.

Gwen’s breath catches in her throat. She taps her ear, activating her comms unit.

‘Tosh,’ she says. ‘Do you know anything about these lockers down in the archive?’

‘They’re time-stamped,’ Tosh replies. ‘You can lock things in there and they’ll only open when that date comes around. They might not look it but they’re pretty indestructible too.’

‘So, these numbers on the screens, those are dates?’

‘They’re all scrambled,’ Tosh says. ‘Better not to know what date something is due to open, it doesn’t set any expectations. Why?’

‘One of them is open.’

‘What’s inside? Is it for us?’

‘I’ll look now.’

Gwen takes a breath to steel herself just in case it is an explosive, and ducks down to look inside.

It’s just an envelope. Cream coloured, sealed with yellowing sellotape. She reaches in and picks it up.

In familiar scratchy cursive, it’s addressed to _Gwen & Tosh_.

*~*TW*~*

Dinner is a strange affair. Jack tells Lucia that Owen doesn’t eat, but can’t explain to her why. He’s doing what he can to avoid giving her too much knowledge of the Torchwood of the future, of what becomes of the people Lucia knows and what happens to make him leader.

Alice has been put to bed so it’s just he, Lucia and Ianto. Owen has chosen to slink off into the night with Jack’s stern words in his ear to be careful and not interfere with _anything_. Owen had scoffed and called him a hypocrite.

Jack tries to keep things light, tries to reminisce with Lucia about the team here in 1976 and the cases they had worked together. Lucia pushes linguini around her plate with her fork, adding the occasional observation, but refuses to be pulled in by Jack. He sees her watching him, and glancing up surreptitiously from her plate to examine Ianto.

‘Do you remember that rift alert down in Porthcawl, Lucia?’ Jack asks, leaning back in his chair, plate already clean. ‘The lost family of Venusian tourists that you helped translate a star map for?’

‘They thanked me with a very firm slap to the face,’ she says.

Jack hoots with laughter.

‘You should have seen the look on your face!’

Lucia finishes her meal, slowly aligning her cutlery down the centre of her plate. She picks it up, then reaches for Jack’s, but Ianto leaps to his feet.

‘No, let me,’ he says.

Jack had been right. Lucia had been able to tell instantly that someone had been in her kitchen, even though Ianto had tidied up, and she had been quite displeased. Ianto had been feeling the need to atone ever since.

With a tight smile, Lucia appeases him.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

Ianto collects all three plates and takes them over to the sink. As he runs the water, and it hits the bottom of the basin noisily, Lucia leans over to Jack.

‘He’s very young for you, Jack,’ she says, eyes on Ianto.

Jack clears his throat. He shifts his chair closer to the table. Lucia fixes him with weary eyes.

‘Don’t you get tired of it, Jack? Of working your way through each generation of Torchwood, laughing and joking, never caring for any of us?’

‘I do care,’ Jack says. ‘I cared about you.’

‘You haven’t been around a lot to show it.’

‘What do you want me to say? You never wanted me around.’

Her eyes flash.

‘I wonder why that is? You’re dangerous, Jack.’

‘I’ve changed.’

‘Does he know? Ianto? Does he know about your… condition?’

‘Yes. They all do. They all know about my _condition_.’

He pronounces the last word as bitterly as she had done.

The sound of the water flowing stops. Up at the sink, Jack watches Ianto drop the plates into the hot water and soap up a sponge, his back to he and Lucia.

‘You hurt people no matter what you try and do,’ Lucia says. ‘Why do you think I helped you today? I want you out of my house, Jack, I need you away from Alice. You and your face, that damn face that never ages a day, you’re only going to cause her pain.’

Jack pushes himself up out of his chair.

‘You know what?’ he says. ‘I’ve heard this all before.’

With that, he strides out of the kitchen, down the hallway, out of the house and into the night.

*~*TW*~*

Gwen doesn’t open the note until she’s back up in the main Hub, the magnifier she’d gone down into the archives for entirely forgotten.

‘To Gwen and Tosh,’ she reads aloud from the note. ‘Hope you’re having a good day, sorry we disappeared on you. Lucky that blowfish didn’t really know what he was doing and we’re only in 1976. Toshiko, please can you run your calculations and use the Rift manipulator to come and get us? October 20th 1976\. DO NOT – that’s in all caps, by the way – do this if there are any risks involved or you are at all uncertain. If you can’t figure it out, call Martha, and she can call the Doctor. He definitely owes me one. Love, Jack. Then there are a bunch of numbers, I think they’re some kind of co-ordinates, and an address in Llandaff.’

Gwen hands the note to Tosh to check it over herself.

‘Definitely co-ordinates,’ she says, scanning it over. ‘Are we sure this isn’t some kind of trick? Remember Billis and how he got us to open the Rift?’

‘If it is, it’s a good copy of Jack’s handwriting,’ Gwen reasons.

‘The blowfish said someone gave him that vortex manipulator.’

Gwen casts her eyes over to her desk, where footage of the blowfish in the cells is showing on one of the screens. He’s curled up into a tight ball on the bench, facing the wall.

‘That is odd,’ she says. She reaches over and checks the note again. ‘I think we have to try though, Tosh. We can’t just leave them.’

Tosh turns back to the vortex manipulator laid out on her desk. She pulls a wire aside with a pair of tweezers and looks at the blinking screen.

‘We might not need to open the Rift,’ she says. ‘I reckon I can fix this, then we can use it to go to the date and time given in the note. If they’re there, we can bring them back. If not, then at least we haven’t accidentally unleashed a huge Rift demon.’

‘Silver linings,’ Gwen says with a smile.

*~*TW*~*

Jack doesn’t return all night. When Owen gets back in from his own stroll, Ianto interrogates him, asking whether he’s seen Jack anywhere but the answer is only no, he hasn’t.

As Lucia takes herself to bed and even Owen lies back on the sofa and closes his eyes in a form of night-time meditation he’s taken to using to give his brain a break, Ianto stands in the window and frets. What if Jack doesn’t come back in time? How long will they be able to wait for him if Gwen and Tosh are using the power of the Rift to come after them?

He manages to doze off in the armchair for a bit, sleeping fitfully, uncomfortable on the wooden arms of the chair. Jack does this sort of thing all the time, he tells himself. He goes off to buildings and he broods.

Ianto doesn’t know what had happened to cause Jack to storm off like he did. It must have been something Lucia said, but he doesn’t know what. All she had said after Jack had walked out was ‘he’s always been dramatic’, and then she had thanked him for washing the dishes before heading upstairs.

Ianto is woken now by the sound of crying from upstairs. He’d been having a strange broken dream about chasing after weevils that were dressed in brown, corduroy suits. He himself was being chased in the dream by a huge, lumbering baby with no face.

He scrunches his eyes up and yawns. He stretches, feeling something in his spine crunch, disagreeing with the upright position he’d drifted off in. He hadn’t bothered to take his suit jacket off and now it’s all rumpled.

Floorboards creak overhead and he hears Lucia murmuring to Alice upstairs.

‘I thought we’d hear more of that in the night,’ Owen says, swinging his legs off the sofa. He slips his feet into his trainers. ‘Aren’t babies supposed to cry a lot?’

‘Maybe she’s outgrown that phase,’ Ianto says, returning to his watch-post in the window. It’s another sunny day, sunlight streaming in through the glass, warming Ianto’s face. He checks his watch then remembers that their journey back through time had somewhat upset it and it was now no good. He’s already planning to order a new one on expenses. An expensive one, after all this.

‘No sign of him?’ Owen asks, coming to join Ianto.

‘Not unless he’s hiding in the rhododendrons.’

Owen claps him on the back then wanders off over to his sofa again.

‘He’ll be back, mate,’ he says.

Ianto hears Lucia’s footsteps at the top of the stairs. He heads out towards the kitchen, thinking that if he can meet her in there and offer her a coffee, he can use that as an excuse to make a very strong one for himself. She’d seemed to approve of his dishwashing capabilities, maybe that meant she wouldn’t mind him making use of her other kitchen facilities. With her permission, this time.

Lucia appears with Alice in her arms. She sets the baby down in a wooden highchair.

‘Ianto,’ she greets him. ‘Everything alright?’

Ianto plasters a smile across his face.

‘Good, yeah, fine,’ he says. ‘Coffee? I can make you one, if you don’t mind?’

‘Well, as you know where everything is already,’ she says wryly, crossing to the fridge. She opens it and pulls out a beaker of milk, which she hands to Alice before taking a seat at the kitchen table.

‘Did Jack come back?’ she asks as Ianto busies himself with the kettle.

‘Oh, uh, no, not yet,’ Ianto answers. He shuts the tap off and sets the kettle down on the hob. ‘I’m sure he’ll be here soon.’

He lights the gas, feeling Lucia’s eyes on him.

‘You should be careful with him, Ianto,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You and Jack. A man who can’t die has got nothing to fear. You need to watch yourself.’

Ianto watches her closely as she speaks, takes in her tired eyes, the way the words leave her looking older than she actually is.

‘I can handle myself, thank you,’ he says after a moment.

‘I’m sure you can. Just try not to fall too hard for him, okay? I’ve seen too many people do that, I’ve seen what gets left behind. One day that’ll be you, one day that’ll even be Alice. He’s the only one who comes out of all this alive.’

Ianto flounders for a response. A part of him wants to come to Jack’s aid, wants to defend what he thinks he and Jack have, wants to make her understand how hard all of this is for Jack. Surely she can see all the hurt he’s been through, the pain he’s so often in, the way people take him for granted?

And yet, with the way she’s looking at him, as if in some miserable, black mirror, he can’t. She’s not saying any of this to be hurtful. Ianto can see that more than anything she just wants to have her daughter be separate from all of this, from the pain and confusion that will come from aging while her unchanging father watches on.

Ianto’s seen Lucia’s files. He knows she retires from Torchwood in 1978 and dies of heart disease in 2006. A rare one that got away. If Torchwood hadn’t become all he knows, if Jack didn’t mean so much to him… Her words would be worth heeding. But it’s too late for Ianto.

The kettle boils.

‘How do you like your coffee?’ he asks her.

*~*TW*~*

Jack finally reappears about half an hour later, finding the others assembled in the living room once again. He stolidly ignores Lucia and heads straight for Alice, tossing her up in the air as if he hasn’t been gone all night.

‘Jack, stop, she just finished eating,’ Lucia tells him.

He doesn’t acknowledge her but does stop throwing Alice over his head. She rests her face against his chest and he holds her tight to him, realising now he should have spent the night watching her sleep, taking everything about her in, rather than roaming the streets.

‘Everybody okay here?’ he asks Ianto and Owen, squashed onto the sofa together.

Owen nods and Ianto shrugs. Jacks spots the creases in Ianto’s suit jacket and the bags under his eyes. His skin prickles, irritated that he had let Lucia get to him last night. She’d always managed to figure out how.

‘Did you tell our rescue team what time to be here?’ Owen asks.

Jack looks to the clock on the mantelpiece, a pearlescent face set in faux mahogany.

‘The co-ordinates I gave them should bring them here at half past,’ he says.

Switching Alice to his other side, he reaches into the inside pocket of his coat. He pulls out a small plastic bag, something round and white inside.

He hands it to Lucia.

‘You should take this once we’ve gone,’ he says. ‘That’s enough of a dose to wipe out the memory of the time we’ve been here. Just to be on the safe side.’

Lucia takes it from him and sets it down on the seat next to her.

The minutes crawl by, the clock dictating the passing of time from its perch above them all. Jack sees Ianto and Owen watching it, counting down. He tries to ignore it himself, focusing on Alice, on all the details of her face, of her laugh, of the ways she moves…

At twenty-eight minutes past the hour, Owen gasps and gets to his feet. Tosh has appeared in the front garden. She stumbles then looks around, taking her surroundings in.

He waves to her through the window. She spots him and beams, jumping on the spot for joy.

Owen dashes out to see her, Ianto hot on his heels.

‘We were so worried we lost you!’ she says as Owen engulfs her in a hug, spinning her around. Ianto wraps an arm around her when Owen sets her down.

‘You got our message then?’ Jack says from the front door, Alice still clinging to him. He’s grinning at her joy, but it’s all teeth and no heart.

‘Loud and clear,’ she says.

Then Jack spots something on her arm, oversized for a woman of her stature.

‘Where are we? Is this where you were sent or did you come here?’ she asks.

‘Long story,’ Owen tells her. ‘Probably best to tell it when we’re safely back in the twenty-first century.’

Jack walks over to the huddle and reaches out for Tosh’s wrist.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asks her, holding up her arm by the vortex manipulator cuffed to it.

‘We tracked the blowfish down, the one who sent you here,’ she explains, letting Jack check it over. ‘It broke after he did it, but I fixed it.’

‘You fixed a time travel device?’ Ianto asks, amused by her genius.

‘Just about,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think we have long, I don’t think this fix is stable. Are you ready to go?’

Ianto and Owen are quick to affirm that they are, indeed, ready to go home. Jack can sense their impatience. The small, warm body clinging nervously now to his torso is leaving him feeling torn. He knows he has to go, he knows this is it.

If only there was more time. He has so much of it but never when he needs it, never for the people who need it.

‘You have to give her back to me now, Jack,’ Lucia says from in the doorway. ‘You can’t take her with you.’

Jack looks down into the little face pressed up against his body. He runs his fingers through her curls and wipes a tear from her rosy cheek. Somehow, Alice can sense something is wrong, something is about to change.

Legs leaden, Jack walks back towards Lucia. He hugs Alice tight to him, trying to imprint this memory of his baby to his body, to his soul.

‘Bye now, baby girl,’ he says thickly as he hands her back to Lucia. Alice reaches an arm out and Jack takes her tiny hand. He presses a kiss to her palm, lets her stroke his face. ‘You be good for your mother, won’t you? I’ll see you soon.’

With one last look to Lucia, Jack sucks in a deep breath and turns away. He claps his hands together.

‘Come on then people, home time,’ he says, following the garden path down to his team.

‘Jack, we don’t have to-,’ Tosh starts.

‘Like you said, Tosh, the fix isn’t stable. We need to go now before we can’t,’ Jack interrupts. He focuses in on her. He can’t let himself turn back around. ‘Have you got the return co-ordinates set?’

She nods.

‘Then everybody grab on. Let’s go.’

Jack reaches up and around the team, throwing his arms around Ianto’s and Owen’s shoulders, drawing them in close. Tosh tucks into Owen’s side, presses a few buttons on the panel of the vortex manipulator, and then they’re gone.

‘Dada!’ Alice cries as Jack and his team disappear. Lucia tries to hush her sobs as she takes her daughter back into the house, but these are full body wails, and nothing she does can calm her.

She sits on the sofa and rocks her baby back and forth, holding her close.

‘Shhh, shh, shh,’ she says. ‘Come on now.’

From the corner of her eye, she spots the packet of Retcon Jack had left for her.

She had known he was going to suggest it. She had also decided before he did so that she wasn’t going to take it.

She pushes the packet onto the floor and grinds the pill to dust beneath her feet.

She needs these memories. They’re a reminder that she hasn’t done enough yet. She needs to leave Torchwood and get her daughter further away from Jack.

*~*TW*~*

This time when they land next to but luckily not in the waters of the Hub basin, Owen, Ianto and Tosh manage to remain on their feet and it’s Jack who crumples to the ground. He stays there, a strange, sad ball of wool coat until Gwen comes bounding over to them.

‘It worked!’ she says, happily hugging her teammates. ‘I was so worried, I’ve been here for an hour on my own shitting myself that none of you were coming back. You alright down there, Jack?’

Jack hauls himself to his feet. It takes so much effort to spring back like he does.

‘Lost the knack of that,’ he says, chucking Gwen a smile. ‘Everybody here, all in one piece?’

He looks around, taking in Gwen’s gleeful face, Tosh’s confused looks, Owen’s relief and Ianto’s concern.

‘I think the vortex manipulator is well and truly burnt out,’ says Tosh, sliding it offer her wrist. Jack reaches out for it and checks it over.

‘Yep, just like mine now. And I don’t think even you could fix that, Tosh,’ he says.

‘I could try.’

‘We shouldn’t have it,’ Jack says firmly. ‘Not a toy for the twenty-first century. The Rift manipulator is bad enough.’

He hands it to Ianto, knowing he will deal with it accordingly. As he does so, he notices the other man still closely scrutinising him, a thoughtful wrinkle between his eyebrows.

‘You still got the blowfish?’ Jack asks, taking the steps up to his office two at a time. The metal grills rattle beneath his boots as he does so.

‘In the cells,’ Gwen says, following after him.

‘He tell you where he got the vortex manipulator?’

‘Someone gave it to him, apparently,’ she answers, on his heels as he walks through his office to his desk and starts rummaging through the drawers.

He looks up from his search at this.

‘Gave it to him?’ he says.

‘That’s what he told us,’ she replies, leaning against the doorframe. ‘He has no idea who though. Or so he says.’

Jack returns to opening the drawers of his desk, alighting on the key he’s looking for in the fourth one he opens, buried under paperwork he’s been ignoring for months.

‘All sorts of aliens around here selling off old junk,’ he says, tucking the key in his pocket. ‘Plenty of them don’t realise what they’ve actually got. Send him on his way with a warning, okay? Tell him we won’t be so friendly next time.’

Gwen nods and leaves. It only takes a second for Ianto’s presence to replace hers.

‘Jack, what happened back there? Are you alright?’ he asks, walking up to Jack’s desk.

Jack smiles softly. He steps out around his desk and kisses Ianto, once on the lips, and then on the forehead.

‘I’m taking a day off,’ he tells him, hands on the other man’s arms as he speaks. ‘Don’t let any of them get up to any mischief, you hear me? I have somewhere I need to be.’

*~*TW*~*

‘Did you not understand my instructions?’ the question comes with a punch to the face, loaded with an extra sting from the hilt of a handgun in the fist.

The blowfish, already battered and bruised from his encounters with Torchwood, looks up at his assailant with a bloodied eye.

‘I did what you asked me to,’ he protests, voice croaking like a pathetic frog, the kind he skewers and watches squeal before eating for dinner. Now he knows how they feel.

Another punch to the other side of his head. Wherever he goes, she manages to find him. Even in this dirty drug den in the scummy side of the city, where he thought he could hide and get loaded to forget it all, she’d tracked him down.

Everyone else around them is too off their heads to take any notice of what’s going on. None of them have even noticed he’s not human, it’s one of the reasons he likes it here.

‘I asked you to get Torchwood’s attention,’ she says. ‘Good, you did that. But I also asked you to get rid of them all. Why do you think I gave you that device? I said get rid of _all of them_.’

‘I thought I did,’ he says, backing up against the corner she’s forced him into.

She leans in and grabs his shirt, just like the Torchwood woman had done earlier.

‘You know there are five of them,’ she hisses.

He kicks out at her.

‘If you want rid of them, do it yourself,’ he says.

‘Now I’m going to have to,’ she says through gritted teeth, letting him go. She straightens up and turns her attention to the gun in her hand.

‘What’re you-?’ he starts to ask.

‘You’re no use to me now,’ she says, then shoots him through the head.

Blood spurts from the exit wound onto the grimy wallpaper. It doesn’t look like it’s the first bloodstain to grace these walls.

She stares down at the body, unmoved.

Her phone rings. She holsters her gun to answer it.

‘Johnson,’ she answers. ‘Yes, sir… We’re going to need another plan. Torchwood are still here.’

*~*TW*~*

Jack knows he’s left plenty of unanswered questions behind him at the Hub. Ianto and Owen will be able to fill Gwen and Tosh in on a lot of what happened, where they had been and what they had learnt. Good. Jack’s tired and doesn’t want to go over it all again. And he’s certainly not ready for all of the new questions that will come up.

He knows he owes Ianto more too. That’ll come, in time.

For now though, he’s at the door of another semi-detached house on a leafy suburban street. He’s not unwelcome here but invites don’t come flooding in. It’s been more than a year since he last came by.

He presses the doorbell, hears it chime inside. Footsteps down the hallway and the sound of the lock being taken off the chain.

‘Dad,’ says the woman who answers, clearly surprised. ‘What’re you doing here?’

Jack takes in the face before him, tracing the echoes of the child he’d held in his arms hours and decades ago. If he was a different man, he’d cry.

Instead, he wrestles his features into a nonchalant grin.

‘It’s been too long,’ he says. ‘Can I come in?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you all enjoyed! Baby Alice has been a huge hit.
> 
> Up next:
> 
> Episode 8: Safe House
> 
> Someone is targeting Torchwood safe houses, attacking and killing the alien refugees the team have tried to protect. Owen, already frustrated that the process to 'fix' him isn't moving any faster, seeing the damage done to aliens he has patched up and befriended before, starts to spiral and lash out.


End file.
